Chapter 39 – Anna
THIRTY-NINE
ANNA
She wondered, having grown up the way she had, if she could survive as a brilliant, beautiful, polished silver medal.
“Where are you taking my stuff?” I asked E.G. He’d insisted on carrying my duffel bag and it hung from his shoulder.
Ricky had dropped us off at the house after a pretty quiet car ride.
After the bomb E.G. had dropped about Allison being pregnant when she died, there wasn’t much for us to talk about.
Truth was, I didn’t know what to say now. Even with the two of us alone in his ridiculous sprawl of a house.
Well, the two of us, our cat and his ghosts.
“To my bedroom,” he answered. “I’ll make some room in the closet and dresser drawers for you.”
“Oh, that’s a heck no,” I said. Rocco meowed to back me up. “We’ll be needing our own room. I know some of the guest rooms are down there, but surely there are about…a million in this place. Don’t you have a separate wing?”
“You require your own wing?”
I hit him with my death laser glare. “You told me to act like the mother of a future billionaire. I’m going to need a wing.”
“I don’t have a wing,” he snapped. “I do have four guest rooms. But I just don’t see the point, Flowers.”
“The point is, I’m not sleeping with you, E.G.”
“We’ve had sex, Flowers. On numerous occasions. Why get precious about it now?”
I wasn’t budging. “I want my own room.”
“Sex can build intimacy,” he suggested.
“Sex can also be confusing as fuck,” I said, flailing my arms a bit. “I don’t even know what happened that day in my office.”
“We fucked.”
I winced. “I know that. Obviously,” I said, pushing out my hips as if to suggest it was my body parts and not my brain that got me into this mess. “I just never thought I would have movie sex.”
“Movie sex?”
“Yeah, where you’re tearing off clothes.
And slamming into things. You can’t even breathe, and then the next thing you know, you’re not wearing a condom.
Movie sex! Anyway, it wrecked me a little and I want to make sure I’ve got a firm handle on my emotions before we even consider doing that again. ”
He approached me then. “So your emotions towards me are out of control right now?”
“I don’t know how I feel about you, even a little bit,” I told him, feeling the hysteria rise like a blush over my skin.
“Am I pissed you knocked me up? Sure. Did I miss you? Maybe. Do I want to playhouse with you now? No. Do I think I can fight you on this and win? No. Do I wish you weren’t still grieving your wife and unborn child?
Yes. Do I think that might ever happen? I don’t know.
I’ve got extreme emotional turmoil happening inside me right now and I’m not making it harder with sex! ”
“That’s what she said,” he said.
I increased the wattage on my death glare to eleven.
He sighed. “Fine. You’re in my house, at least. I can give you space. Follow me.”
He hitched my bag up his shoulder and I did the same with Rocco’s carryon.
We headed down the long hallway where I knew his room was at the end. As we got closer, I frowned.
“What happened to space?”
He opened the door next to his. “If something happens, if you need anything, you can get to me quickly.”
My face must have shown some of my skepticism.
“We’re not sleeping in the same bed,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, because we’re not a couple,” I told him.
“Yet.”
Why did he make it sound like a threat?
“There is too much to unpack in that, so I’m not going to try,” I said, and pushed past him into the room. It was massive, like his. Glancing around, I could see it had a connecting ensuite bathroom. Minus the kitchen, the room was probably as big as my entire apartment.
All the space I needed.
“I need to set up Rocco in the bathroom,” I said, moving in that direction.
“Why the bathroom?”
“Because cats need a small safe space to get used to first, before they can venture out. God, don’t you know anything about being a parent?”
“No,” he said quietly.
I was not about to feel guilty about that remark. Or at least, I was going to try and not feel guilty.
Allison had been pregnant. She’d been pregnant.
“Drop my duffel bag on the bed, please. And then go figure out what you’re going to feed me.”
“You’re hungry?” he asked. There was a note of alarm in his voice. As if hunger was some concerning symptom.
He would need to get over that quickly. In the last few weeks, when I hadn’t been puking my guts out, I’d been in a constant state of starvation.
“Ravenous,” I admitted. “I want all the weird stuff, too. Hot dogs in ice-cream. Cookies with pickles in between them like a sandwich. Macaroni and cheese with turkey gravy on top.”
He winced. “Seriously?”
I nodded. “For now, I’ll be good with some crackers and club soda. See, I want all those things, but when I start thinking about them, I get a little nauseous. I need something to settle my stomach down before I can eat.”
“A little nauseous?” he asked and tried to hide a gagging noise.
“Go figure something out,” I said and pointed to the door. “I mean it.”
He started to leave, then stopped when he got to the door. His back still toward me, his head down.
“Flowers…I wish I wasn’t still grieving my wife and unborn child, too.
I wish I could tell you I was ready to give you all of me.
But I can’t. The truth is, I never wanted this again.
But you walked into my life and shook everything up.
My emotions are all over the place, too, but I do know one thing, and that is, having you here makes the pain go away.
Seeing you, hearing your voice, all of it. You make the pain go away.”
He left with that and part of me wanted to tell him I wasn’t a bottle of aspirin. Being the thing that made him hurt less, wasn’t enough for me. I deserved more than that. I deserved to be something other than someone’s pain reliever.
I sunk down on the bed and thought about where we went from here. Living in his house. Having his baby. While the ghost of his pregnant wife still haunted him. It did make more sense now, though.
E.G. wasn’t just consumed with sorrow. There was guilt there, too. He might have been able to accept a tragic accident that took the life of his wife, but he would never believe there was nothing he could have done to protect his child.
It would make him an excellent father if he could allow himself to love again.
Walking away from him hadn’t worked. All I’d done was make us both miserable for weeks.
I needed a Plan B.
“What do you think, kiddo?” I asked my still flat belly. “You think I should fight for your dad?”
This would have been a really cool moment for the baby to kick for the first time.
Instead, I just let out an obnoxious burp as my stomach growled and demanded food.
“What about you, Rocco?”
He meowed vociferously.
“I guess I’ll take that as a yes.”